IRS Audits Targeted Poor at Higher Rate Than Millionaires in ’22

New House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said in his acceptance speech repealing the funding for “funding for 87,000 new IRS agents” will be “our first bill” – and that came amid a recent report finding a far-higher audit rate for lower-income taxpayers than millionaires.

Still, the report spins that data to suggest more agents are needed to go after millionaires more, rather than reduce the effort to scrape from the poor to fund the Democrats’ big-spending agenda.

“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates — five and a half times virtually everyone else — were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) reported this week.
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TRAC called the poorer taxpayers “easy marks,” but President Joe Biden is an alumnus of Syracuse, and the report does argue the IRS “doesn’t have the resources.”

Regardless, the data showed a bias to audit the poor over millionaires if you throw out “correspondence audits” that merely send a letter in the mail.

“If one ignores the fiction of auditing a millionaire through simply sending a letter through the mail, the odds that millionaires received a regular audit by a revenue agent (1.1%) was actually less than the audit rate of the targeted lowest income wage-earners whose audit rate was 1.27%!” the report read.

“While these small differences may sound trivial, the difference represented tens of thousands of low -income families. And the question remains, should these low-income families be the ones targeted when millionaires are responsible dollarwise for most tax underreporting?”

With inflation raging and recession talk still a potential drag on the economy in 2023, McCarthy’s speech vowed to try to repeal the funding of 87,000 new IRS agents in the new Congress – even with Democrats’ control the Senate and Biden is in the White House.

“There is nothing more important than making it possible for American families to live and enjoy the lives they deserve,” McCarthy said in his speech early Saturday morning. “That is why we commit to stop wasteful Washington spending to lower the price of groceries, gas, cars, and housing and stop the rising national debt.

“We pledge to cut the regulatory burden, lower energy costs for families, and create good-paying jobs for workers by unleashing reliable, abundant American-made energy.

“Our first bill will repeal funding for 87,000 new IRS agents. Because the government should be here to help you, not go after you.”